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I consider this a Radical Gumbo, with many varied ingredients making more than the sum of its parts. We are no-holds barred, passionate and not overly PC here. Yes, Liberals can have Fangs. Jump in and be part of the cutting edge!
A new online craze has young people getting high off of "digital drugs," [Oklahoma] News 9 reports.
The trend, called i-Dosing, is a supposedly "legal" and "safe" way to alter one's consciousness.
According to [Oklahoma] News 9, these "digital drugs" use "binaural, or two-toned, technology to alter your brain waves and mental state," producing a "state of ecstasy" for the user. i-Dosers listen to these atonal tracks while sitting motionless with headphones on.
It may sound benign, but parents, educators and law officials are worried that i-Dosing could be addictive, harmful, and a gateway "drug" to other illegal substances. The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has taken an interest in the phenomenon. "Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about," the Bureau's spokesperson Mark Woodward told Kansas News 9, "and it can lead them to other places."
Stan and the Volcano-Why Firing the General Was an Act of God
Paul Krassner
The volcano in Iceland was considered an Act of God.
Smoke from the volcano caused countless flights to be canceled.
The Rolling Stone correspondent was stuck in Paris.
Embedded there, he hung around with talkative drinkers.
They revealed stuff while forgetting it was being told to a reporter.
He wrote in his article what they had said.
The fact checkers verified those statements.
The article was shown to Barack Obama.
Whether he fired McChrystal or didn't, Republicans would criticize.
The president fired the general, ultimately due to an Act of God.
Like dat.
Bet on it.
The way it really works.
The single concept that adequately explains the continuing survival of the human species.
The entire universe is a multidimensional, constantly interweaving web of events. It is "intelligent" on levels that dwarf the minds of the greatest among us. Listening to the news is like looking at a cartoon of a sunset, an iPhone photo of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Just a quick word from my latest incursion into Middle America. I have been on a band bus for well over a week. On interstates, performing in small city theaters, suburban culture centers and nasty-spirited casinos, eating in rural truck stops, chain fast food joints and upscale bar/restaurants, staying in shoddy, rundown motels and semi-glitzy hotel chains, playing for a commercial act that attracts the media-tranced out, clomp-clomp-clomping, dead center, USA Today-reading thirtyish to sixtyish Omertican middle class like artificial sweeteners attract robotic flies.
From Massachusetts through Maryland and right on into the Great Plains heartland.
AIN'T no "recession."
Sorry.
Just more hype.
I watch out the bus window as BMW after BMW rolls by.
I see thousands of fools giving their excess money away to casinos.
Thousands more swilling down fat and chemical-laden food and then belly-rolling out to their credit-bought cars full of cheap gas...yes, cheap, at least compared to prices in less militarily inclined powers...to go see a stupid movie or semi-fixed ballgame. (Yes, Virginia, there is a Fixer. It's called wealth. The wealthy teams win, the less wealthy teams lose. Duh. Just like in politics. Duh!!!)
Booman posted a short piece recently on Booman Tribune titled Run Newt Run.
In it, he quite accurately stated :
I get the feeling that the Republican primaries are going to be the weirdest, most depressing, and terrifying thing I've ever seen. Gingrich might be one of the saner candidates. But even the people with a passing familiarity with reality, like Romney and Pawlenty, will feel compelled to out-crazy the crazies. By the end of the debates, we might be debating whether the wrong side won the Civil War.
It is amazing how people want to blame the Politicians and the Government, (in some ways correctly) and yet reserve no anger for the Wall Street and Financial Goliaths who are truly to blame.
Diane and Mr. Chomsky are both wrong.
It is not "amazing".
The corporations run the media and the media run the "people." Including those who are somehow mystified at the misplaced blame inherent in this state of affairs.
I watched MSNBC's so-called "documentary" about Timothy McVeigh last night, and I have never witnessed a more masterful overall piece of hypno-disinformation.
Read on.
Unless of course you are too busy responding to hypnomedia advertising to be able to distinguish the woods from the fake trees.
=============================================
***Disclaimer. This is not a "pro-McVeigh" article. It is an anti-hypnomedia article. If you cannot discern the difference between the two, I suggest you go climb that fake tree above. Bring microwave protection, because you are already fairly badly poisoned.
In this superheated, paranoid, class-warring world, I am sure that the title of this piece raised expectations in many of your overwrought minds of yet another attack on one of the Teabgging right wing/Christian Militia/Catholic Church pedophile/Sarah Palin holier-than-thou ("But I will burn witches if elected!") crews that populate the far right edges of our media-delineated universe.
But it is not.
It is about a simple working class man who performed an heroic act today and saved three lives.
I ran into his story on my semi-nightly "Click through the local NYC 11PM news shows as fast as possible to see if there is anything happening on the streets that I should take into account when I go out of the door tomorrow" run through the corporate media hell that we laughingly call "TV."
For decades conservatives have worked to see that blacks and latinos are undercounted in the Census. Now they are voluntarily disenfranchising themselves by refusing to send in the forms. Should we be happy about that? After all, it could cost them seats in Congress and votes in the Electoral College, and it will mean more federal dollars are available for blue and purple areas of the country. But, the thing is, the Census is supposed to accurately count the population of the country, and political power is supposed to be divvied up on the basis of a real assessment of the country's demography. So, no, I am not happy that the most conservative areas are the least responsive to the Census, even though it serves my narrow political interests. You can't cure stupid, and I will weep no tears for these folks, but I am not happy to see a new strain of irrational paranoia taking root in the reddest areas of this country.
It's dangerous.
Get real.
The "census" is as broken as is the rest of this system. Trust a broken system? Why? Minorities and the poor in general have always known the truth of the matter, and I know for a stone fact that the majority of people that I have met in my 40+ years of urban semi-ghetto living would no more fill out a census form or open a door to a stranger than they would tell a policeman that yes, they did smoke some pot once in a while.
"Irrational paranoia?"
How about William Burroughs' definition of a paranoid?
"One who is in possession of all the facts."
Yup.
I am a fan of rational paranoia, myself.
You know...like the kind of "paranoia" that any sane German during Hitler's run or Russian during the Stalin reign might have felt?
Lived by, actually.
Survived by.
Yup.
What's that you say? This is not Communist Russia or Nazi Germany?
Right you are.
It's digitally surveilled and hypnomediaed-out MediaAmerica.
Who needs informers when you have digital eavesdropping?
In fact...who will need digital eavesdropping once everyone is TeleBorged?
In the words of Jack Nicholsen's proto-teabagger Colonel Jessep in the film "A Few Good Men":
You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!
Yup.
Booman recently wrote a piece called Teabagging Ugliness in which he rightfully bemoaned the racism of many Tea Party members.
But then he added:
I'd like to meet the people who called him [John Lewis] a 'nigger' today.
To which I responded:
For God's sake, Booman!
Do you not go out of the house?
Do you not spend hours on the tube? On the jitternet?
"Meet" them? They're fucking everywhere!!!
And I then went on to elaborate on that point.
A poster named eclecticbrotha commented on my reply:
No. They ARE NOT everywhere.
What the corporate media has done is amplify their antics to give the false impression that they're a large, vocal presence in America but its the same lunatic fringe that has always existed on the margins of political discourse in this country. The only reason they get airtime now is because the media enjoys clinging to the idea that America will not accept a black man as president, even though 57% of the electorate already put one in the White House. We are witnessing a strange bipolar message being presented through our media airwaves: showing nearly all white hordes at rallies hysterically and irrationally claiming Obama is the "illegitimate president and seeing a lily-white GOP vigorously opposing everything he tries to accomplish, all while the media declares his election has led America into the so-called "post-racial" era.
Apparently, to the corporate media, "post-racial" means pretending obvious racist antics really aren't.
And that was just about enough leftiness shmoonery for me.
Read on for my comments upon the truth of this matter if you can handle the heat.
Or stick your head back into your ass shell if that's what will make you more comfortable.
It really doesn't matter much what you do.
Outnumbered and outgunned, we are all in the position of Walter Moseley's great Socrates Fortlow character.
All we can do is to continue to try to act honorably in a dishonorable world.
The ones calling [Joe Stack] crazy are the ones that are sponges for MSM, haven't a problem in the world, and wouldn't insult their intelligence by reading the rantings of a deranged man.
Precisely.
Except of course...that he was "deranged."
He had been driven crazy by the ongoing contradictions of this system as it now stands.
Here is an interesting headline from today's mainstream news. (And it doesn't get any more "mainstream" than CNN.):
CNN Poll: Majority think government is broken
Americans overwhelmingly think that the government in this country is broken, according to a new national poll. But the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, released Sunday morning, also indicates that the public overwhelmingly holds out hope that what's broken can be fixed.
Eighty-six percent of people questioned in the poll say that our system of government is broken, with 14 percent saying no.
Of even more interest to me are the following lines.
Of that 86 percent, 81 percent say that the government can be fixed, with 5 percent saying it's beyond repair.
Read on for more.
Much more. (Including the reason for including the above image.)
In the Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes was able to deduce that the killer of Colonel Ross's racehorse was the owner of the stable dog. As the fictional Holmes chronicler Dr. John Watson explains:
Colonel Ross still wore an expression which showed the poor opinion which he had formed of my companion's ability, but I saw by the inspector's face that his attention had been keenly aroused
"You consider that to be important?" he asked.
"Exceedingly so."
"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.
The only person at whom the stable dog would not bark warnings was the dog's owner. Hence, the dog's silence indicated that the only one who could have entered the stable and killed the horse, was the dog's owner.
At 1:43:55 PM EST halo0 posted the following message on Booman Tribune regarding a website where Joe Stack quite plainly offered his final thoughts before crashing a plane into the IRS building in Austin Texas. :
"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." - Richard Dawkins
As of less than one hour later that website has been taken down.
I offer the full posting below in the spirit of truth, as well as my own thoughts on the matter.
Read on if you are interested.
And if you are not interested...well, check your mental and spiritual antennae for serious damage. This is what is really happening here now, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Now first off...I must tell you that I do not give a good goddamn who wins any big time American hypnomedia-sponsored sports event. Not in terms of being a "fan", anyway. It don't mean shit to me which group of overpaid, coddled-from-puberty motherfuckers wins a game of this sort on a purely sports or competition-based level. Two or three weeks from now no one except people who have nothing better to occupy their minds will even be able to remember which two teams played the game.
But still...the universe works in strange and mysterious ways, and anything that receives as much hype as the Stupor Bowl has a function in the grand scheme of things on this planet.
In Thursday's (1/4) Open Thread on Booman Tribune, Booman asked the magic question "What the hell was that?" regarding Carly Fiorina's California Ratpublican gubernatorial primary ad that has come to be known as "The Demon Sheep" ad throughout the media.
So gotterdemerung wrote a mildly snarky piece titled Caption This featuring a pic of Barack Obama goofing with a black guy on a street somewhere in mixed-race America. A piece which received several equally mildly snarky replies.
I had a sort of epiphany the other day. It was like stepping through to the other side of the mirror and finally understanding what is happening in the United States and a good part of the rest of the world. I would like to share it with you.
